I’m CEO of Digital Power Group, a tech and investment advisory, a Senior Fellow with the Manhattan Institute, a Faculty Fellow at the school of Engineering & Applied Science at Northwestern University, on the boards of the Marshall Institute, a think tank focused on space and missile defense, and Notre Dame's Reilly Center for Science, Technology & Ethics. I co-authored the energy-tech book "The Bottomless Well," was the tech strategist for a boutique venture fund, a tech advisor for Banc of America Securities, and co-authored a tech investment newsletter. I served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan, and studied physics at Queen’s University, Canada, and Rutgers. I may hold positions in or advise companies mentioned.

Manufacturing, 3D Printing and What China Knows About the Emerging American Century

Scratch the surface of tech innovation today, look outside the sphere of social media and gaming and you find a burgeoning array of companies, innovators, emerging students across the spectrum of businesses and technologies engaged in finding new ways to make stuff from raw materials. 3D printing is the hot tech de jour, the harbinger of the factory-of-the-future.

The emergent hype surrounding 3D printing lies with the handful of new companies that are making what amounts to desktop, or at least refrigerator-sized 3D printers. The 3D printer offers a paradigm shift, especially in metallurgy, where net final parts are assembled from powder from the ground up (from a computer image) rather than ground and melted into shape from a billet, from the top down. The latter has the tendency to waste a lot of material, the former has a certain precision and elegance.

Personal 3D printers, personal manufacturing, some argue, offers the potential to move a lot of manufacturing into neighborhoods, even your garage and upend manufacturing the way laser printers upended the centralized paper printing industry. It has the potential to be — to use that now over-used word — “disruptive.”

3D printing is already a viable commercial business where highly customized parts are needed for such applications as rare cars, aircraft, or medical devices like knee joints. You can start with precision scanning or a computer design, and can make a perfectly customized replacement part. In medicine it’s no longer theory but increasingly common, in particular in fabricating dental prosthetics. Make a 3D image from scratch, or make a 3D scan of an object, send it to the printer – feed in the appropriate ceramic, metal, or plastic powder, melt or fuse with lasers or electron beams and the part appears in thin air. It is pretty exciting, pretty cool.

Manufacturing’s future lies not just with the seductive allure of back-yard manufacturing, or mini-factories that can mass customize idealized products, but in equally impactful emerging advances in materials science.

The combination of powerful imaging tools and supercomputing is yielding an era where we literally engineer novel materials, perhaps even novel new molecules. Examples range from the seemingly pedestrian but remarkably useful self-cleaning materials (walls, fabrics, windows), to the truly exotic metamaterials that exhibit properties ostensibly violating physics – producing a negative index of refraction, which in English means you might render objects invisible for example.

My favorite poster-child of material engineering from the quantum mechanics level up is Northwestern University’s spin-off QuesTek where computer models of atomic behavior are used to design what amounts to perfect alloys – metals with exactly the right properties and minimizing material waste and cost.

Much of the future of manufacturing will be found in Silicon Valley; software companies in general, Autodesk [NASDAQ: ADSK] in particular, are key players in 3D printing. The future is also be found in the good old ‘rust’ belt. Venerable companies like Timken [NYSE: TKR], Eaton [NYSE: ETN], Emerson [NYSE: EMR], and CAT [NYSE: CAT] are already deeply engaged in building the technologies and factories of the future – a factor underlying the recent uptick in America’s heartland’s manufacturing output.

On a larger scale, 3D printing is essentially how many factories already operate. Finished goods are ‘printed’ from the panoply of raw materials feeding a modern automated production line. That is certainly the case with semiconductor microprocessor plants where complex silicon devices made from a soup of dozens of elements from the periodic table, are printed on dinner-plate-sized silicon wafers, and done so by the square mile of silicon in buildings utterly dominated by automated systems.

Just as the now century-old IBM [NYSE: IBM] survived and prospered from the era of its birth with mechanical adding machines, to the age of data centers, so too will many of today’s manufacturing giants not only survive but embrace the new era of manufacturing. And many of them have the advantage of being located in America.

If the future of manufacturing is information-centric — from materials innovation, to 3D printing, to disruptive business models — is that a field where China necessarily dominates? Could be, but there is no guarantee. Creativity, innovation, flexibility, flexible education, entrepreneurship are the characteristics needed to foster the new era of manufacturing. These are the hallmarks of the American enterprise.

China is rushing to emulate the American educational structure, protection of intellectual property and patents, fostering of entrepreneurship, even a more free-spirited capitalist culture. All of this is good, not just for China, but for the world’s economy. But this mix of requirements is where China is in catch-up mode and America remains the leader. Add to this formulation the demographic fact that, by about 2025 America will be a younger country than China. Innovation requires a population and culture that is youth-centric.

Humans have been manufacturing stuff from natural resources for eons. Glass from sand pre-dates Rome; the origin of wooden axles is lost in antiquity. The world has gone through two great pivots in manufacturing capabilities. The first was the age of the Medieval Machine (see the excellent book of the same name), epitomized by the water mill. The second was the Industrial Revolution. The third manufacturing revolution is upon us. America has the advantage. The whole world will participate and economic growth, and full employment, will follow, again.

“One of the most distinctive features of the modern world is the capacity of human societies to increase their productivity, the proportion of goods produced in relation to the size of the total population. In a literal as well as in a metaphorical sense, they have discovered the way of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, and they have thereby enormously increased the total wealth of society….the main key to this achievement has been the availability of a stream of technological tools.”

Where would you look for the new stream of technological tools? China? Some for sure, and increasingly so. The rest, dominantly still, the United States. <>

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Wow, great article. There are many great 3D printers out there. Everyone is racing to become the top player of the market. One of those players is 2BOT. They manufacture the ModelMaker. This machine uses inexpensive materials, plus, it can make any size model possible (through a little tiling). www.2bot.com/product-info

From what I’ve seen of these 3D printers, they can only create single parts at a time. If the item that they are trying to create needs multiple parts, internal parts, or moving parts, they must be manufactured separately. The printers I’ve seen also only produce small things, except if they are industrial settings. I don’t think the man and his dog working in a garage will be able to build a large complex piece of equipment.

In order to truly replace manufacturing as we know it, the person manufacturing the items in his neighborhood garage would not only need to understand computers, but mechanical engineering, metallurgy, plastics, and probably electrical engineering. Is this possible? I don’t think so. Maybe if we were all Thomas Edisons or Jefferersons.

You’re ultimately talking about moving to a molecular level. And I,m only partially in agreement. Silicon wafers, (soon to be made out of Carbonaro , diamond substrate), could be made on the level you’re suggesting, but there are so many other processes which don’t allow for this 3d printing approach. Oh, I think this process will happen, just not as wide spread as you suggest. Great article Mark!

Manufacturing is a lot more about scheduling than turning screws. Replacing some line workers with 3D printers doesn’t change that. The US needs to relearn Operations Research and Industrial Engineering too.

The Defense Dept has a lot of interesting work in computer-based training. Consider the disparity between the level of training of system designers and system users. Business will have to find a way to make this training more agile, though.

It’s also useful to note that the future of 3D printing means the death of inventory, which can mean as much to economic efficiency as the death of the filing cabinet. A few years ago, sheet of paper in a filing cabinet was priced at $100 over its lifetime, based on the cost of production, storage, retrieval, and duplication, while the cost of the equivalent in digital form was priced at under $3 (hardware, software, and administration isn’t free). This shift created the digital economy of today. Now imagine if the cost of handling physical goods could be reduced to 1/30 of today- likewise difficult to imagine the changes to the economy and new industries this could create.

The “dam digging” was a WPA job. It was made just inefficient enough so that everyone had a “job”. Having people work at inefficient jobs instead of collecting unemployment or welfare keeps them in the employment loop and something is actually accomplished for the expenditure of public money. Off shoring jobs to save a few penneys and then telling the laid off worker, “reinvent yourself and be an entrepreneur” will not magically create gainful employment. Many people because of temperament or low intelligence can only do menial work. If all such work is off shored,automated or given to illegal immigrants we will have a permanent underclass of unemployable and as your grandma said “idle hands are the Devils workshop”. If government spending is reduced to the actual constitutional limits millions more will be unemployed. Most of these people are intelligent enough to actually be productive at something but at what I haven’t a clue. The wealthy will have to help support them until some kind of leisure,make work economy is developed.

Six years ago when we started the Reprap project at Bath University an entry level 3D printer cost $50,000. A full Huxley kit can now be bought for just under $500.

Printed objects that cost $5/cubic inch are now down to about $0.25 cents. If anybody is still under the impression that this isn’t going to be more earthshaking than word processors and ink jet printers, dream on bro.

A small but (perhaps) ironic correction: IBM did NOT invent the adding machine. Wm. Burroughs did, patenting it in 1888. IBM (Herman Hollerith) invented and popularized the tabulating machine for the US census in 1890. The irony is that the Burroughs corporation and IBM’s paths crossed in the 1960′s & 1970′s in the computer arena. IBM won and Burroughs went out of business.

A Significant player in the emerging market is www.kraftwurx.com. Significant because they were arguably the inventor of the online community and marketplace for 3D printing in the cloud, first published in 2006 and picked up by media in early 2007. Kraftwurx also shows early intellectual property knowledge that looks astoundingly just like what all the other startups have finally begun to build to in 2012. See the IP information here: http://fabbaloo.com/blog/2012/1/6/kraftwurxs-patent-available.html